Thriller writers face challenge to unmask new stories in age of Covid: Ian McMillan

They’ll need all their nimble thinking to write thrillers that reflect and amplify these terrible and turbulent times, though. I guess we’ll get a lot of books that are versions of conspiracy theories and there will be evil scientists in white coats creating new strains of the virus in underground bunkers until our hero or heroine infiltrates their ranks and there’s a stand-off in the last chapter where the chief baddy (to use a technical term) threatens to pour a vial of the virus into the water system of a major city but gets foiled in the last sentence of the final paragraph.

But where will the more low-key thriller go? If we can’t travel far outside our houses and can’t mix then how do we assemble a range of suspects for the 2020 equivalent of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot to question and make deductions from? You couldn’t gather them all in one room; well, you could, if there were just six of them, but it would have to be a room the size of an aircraft hangar and the detective would have to shout their questions across the echoing space. I’ve just remembered: you’re not supposed to shout because it’s a transmitter of the disease. The detective would have to pass his questions on notes to the suspects and they’d have sanitise, and then reply on different pieces of paper.

And of course bad guys like robbers often wear masks but these days everybody wears a mask. I suppose that might be a source of additional plot twists because when you’ve got a mask on nobody really knows who you are (unless you’ve got signature hair, like me) and I can imagine an almost Shakespearean plot where the hero and the villain both look alike until, in a final climactic scene, one unmasks the other.

As we trundle into late autumn, I could imagine a kind of Yorkshire Noir thriller with a private eye slouching through a street in the drizzle. He passes a bar where, because it’s 10pm, the doors are closed and the owner is stacking the chairs on the tables. A man in a mask runs by, a little too quickly, pursued by another man in a mask. “He’s got my antiseptic wipes!” the second man whispers to anyone who will listen.

Ah, the fast-paced world of the coronavirus thriller!

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James Mitchinson